The Inheritance of Loss

In Kalimpong, a town at the foot of the Himalayas in mid-1980s India, a retired Cambridge-educated judge lives in a damp old house called Cho Oyu with his orphaned teenage granddaughter Sai and an aging cook. As the Gorkha insurgency builds in the surrounding hills, Sai falls in love with her Nepali math tutor Gyan, who is drawn into the movement, while the cook's son Biju works without papers in a string of New York restaurant basements. Desai braids the judge's memories of colonial-era England, Sai's coming of age, and Biju's immigrant misery into a single generational portrait of post-Independence Indian loss.